There a lot of people in the gaming and Star Wars communities, and they were really excited when EA announced about a year ago that it was investing $80 million into a Star Wars themed MMORPG. That game launched as Star Wars: The Old Republic and racked up a large number of users very quickly. It appears that the popularity of the game may be cooling.

According to EA, the game had 1.3 million subscribers at the end of April. At the end of February, the game had 1.7 million subscribers. The reduction coincides with the game's launch in the Asia-Pacific region. Star Wars: TOR comes with a free month subscription so some subscriber fall off was expected shortly after the launch, but the number of losses has surprised many.

EA maintains that the subscriber drop-off is consistent with its projections. Subscriber losses being consistent still didn't prevent EA's shares from dropping as much as 10% in after-hours trading. According to EA interim CFO Peter Moore, "a substantial portion of the decrease [was] due to casual and trial players cycling out of the subscriber base, driving up the overall percentage of paying subscribers."

Casual gamers tend to drop out and stop playing when their free month subscription is over. EA is talking about plans to keep paying customers paying with character expansions and more. EA CEO John Riccitiello counters that the MMORPG is one of the company's top 10 profitable titles.

"It's a business contributor, while important, is not as important as Medal of Honour or Battlefield or FIFA or Madden or The Sims or SimCity," he said.

Many think competition in the MMORPG sector will only get more intense with the announcement that The Elder Scrolls Online is coming next year.

SWTOR failed to capture the sense of exploring a living world that we had in SWG, EQ, WoW and most other MMOs. SWTOR felt more like a game that was meant for single players with the MMO element tacked on. I really wanted to love this game, but it got boring. Maybe they should have just given us KOTOR3 like we wanted in the first place.

I played Star Wars Galaxies and when reading up on SWTOR decided it would not be for me. After having friends who did try it tell me more about it I was glad I never even started it. The sandbox of Galaxies was the best, you could do something different almost every time you logged on and the content was pretty much made up by the players instead of just walking through some short story and repeating. I switched to playing the SWG Emulator that is based on the very first version which had the most players in the beginning and is so much better than anything I have ever tried before or since. All professions allow you to mix and match what you want from any class, you can be a medic/rifleman or an entertainer/scout or any combination you wish. I just hope the get the space portion finished soon, that was the best part ever.

Hey Jedi can you tell me what Pre-CU Emmulator you're using and how many people are on the servers? I Googled this up http://www.galaxiesreborn.com/ Is that them?

It seems interesting and I really admire their tenacity in keeping the love for SWG going. Maybe instead of hoping newer games capture that SWG magic, I should just play the real thing lol. I have my game discs somewhere....

My vote for KOTOR 3 too. A real shame that the franchise died. (No, I dont consider TOR really related to the true KOTOR single player games. It is an MMO, set in a different time period, and cannot possible bring closure to the questions left open at the end of KOTOR 2).

Sad really. Seems like Bioware hasn't had a game with a good ending since KOTOR 1 actually. They just seem to have to have some morally ambiguous ending that leaves everything up in the air.